The Antechamber: Toward a History of Waiting

By Helmut Puff

Helmut Puff invites readers to visit societies and spaces of the past through the lens of a particular temporal modality: waiting. From literature, memoirs, manuals, chronicles, visuals, and other documents, Puff presents a history of waiting anchored in antechambers—interior rooms designated and designed for people to linger.

In early modern continental Western Europe, antechambers became standard in the residences of the elites. As a time-space infrastructure these rooms shaped encounters between unequals. By imposing spatial distance and temporal delays, antechambers constituted authority, rank, and power. Puff explores both the logic and the experience of waiting in such formative spaces, showing that time divides as much as it unites, and that far from what people have said about early moderns, they approached living in time with apprehensiveness. Unlike how contemporary society primarily views the temporal dimension, to early modern Europeans time was not an objective force external to the self but something that was tied to acting in time. Divided only by walls and doors, waiters sought out occasions to improve their lot. At other times, they disrupted the scripts accorded them. Situated at the intersection of history, literature, and the history of art and architecture, this wide-ranging study demonstrates that waiting has a history that has much to tell us about social and power relations in the past and present.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Oct 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9781503637030

Helmut Puff

Helmut Puff is Professor in the Departments of History and Germanic Languages at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Book preview

THE ANTECHAMBER

Toward a History of Waiting

Helmut Puff

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2023 by Helmut Puff. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Puff, Helmut, author.

Title: The antechamber : toward a history of waiting / Helmut Puff.

Other titles: Cultural memory in the present.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2023. | Series: Cultural memory in the present | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023017219 (print) | LCCN 2023017220 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503635418 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503637023 (paperback) | ISBN 9781503637030 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: European literature--Themes, motives. | Waiting (Philosophy) in literature. | Entrance halls in literature. | Time in literature. | Space in literature.

Classification: LCC PN56.W215 P84 2023 (print) | LCC PN56.W215 (ebook) | DDC 809/.93384--dc23/eng/20230508

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023017219

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023017220

Cover design and etching treatment: Lindy Kasler

Artwork: Salomon Kleiner, Antechamber, (Upper Belvedere), Vienna, 1733 (detail)

Cultural Memory in the Present

Hent de Vries, Editor

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Times

2. Spaces

3. Encounters

Conclusion

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Map, with locations mentioned

FIGURE 1. Daniel Cramer, Octoginta emblemata moralia

FIGURE 2. Temperantia, western facade of the Munich Residenz

FIGURE 3. Gerhard Emmoser, Celestial Clock with Clockwork

FIGURE 4. Garden facade, former palace of the prince-bishop of Münster

FIGURE 5. [Baltasar Gracián], Obras de Lorenzo Gracian, dividas en dos tomos (title page)

FIGURE 6. Abraham-Nicolas Amelot de la Houssaye, L’homme de cour, traduit de l’Espagnol de Baltasar Gracian (frontispiece)

FIGURE 7. Ground plan of the Papal Palace in Avignon, upper floor

FIGURE 8. Antechamber, Pyrmont Castle, Bad Pyrmont, Germany

FIGURE 9. Profiterò del mio ingegno, emblem, antechamber, Pyrmont Castle

FIGURE 10. Door in the antechamber, Pyrmont Castle

FIGURE 11. Ground plan, Eremitage, Old Castle, Bayreuth

FIGURE 12. Rudolf Heinrich Richter, The Women of Rome Cause the Enemies to Withdraw from the City, ca. 1740

FIGURE 13. Wilhelm Wunder attr., Themistocles before the Persian King Artaxerxes, before 1744

FIGURE 14. Studio of Antoine Pesne, Court Scenes in a Garden Architecture, Charlottenburg Castle

FIGURE 15. Studio of Antoine Pesne, Guitarist with Women and a Page (detail), Charlottenburg Castle

FIGURE 16. Studio of Antoine Pesne, Gallant Scenes (detail), Charlottenburg Castle

FIGURE 17. Salomon Kleiner, Antechamber (Upper Belvedere), Vienna, 1733 (print)

FIGURE 18. Goethe’s residence, Gelber Saal, Weimar

FIGURE 19. Floor plan, Residenz, Munich

FIGURE 20. First antechamber, or Kleine Ritterstube (Kurfürstenzimmer), Residenz, Munich (before wartime loss)

FIGURE 21. William Tolman Carlton, Watch Meeting—Dec. 31st 1862—Waiting for the Hour

FIGURE 22. Johann Georg Seybold, Teutsch-Lateinisches Wörter Büchlein, 1695, 166

FIGURE 23. Johann Georg Seybold, Teutsch-Lateinisches Wörter-Büchlein, 1695 (detail)

Acknowledgments

Without the unwavering support of colleagues and friends, this project would never have left the realm of the antechamber: the place of anticipation, dread, and hope. On my home turf, the University of Michigan, I want to single out for their collegial warmth those without whose encouragement I could not have written this book: Kerstin Barndt, Stephen Berrey, Kathleen Canning (now Rice University), David Caron, Deborah Dash Moore, Dario Gaggio, Andreas Gailus, William Glover, Megan Holmes, Val Kivelson, Teresa Kovacs (now Indiana University), Kenneth Mills, Farina Mir, Anthony Mora, Jennifer Nelson (now University of Wisconsin), Cathy Sanok, Elizabeth Sears, Mrinalini Sinha, Scott Spector, Melanie Tanielian, Johannes von Moltke, Silke Weineck, and Claire Zimmerman. Kathryn Babayan has been a dream friend and intellectual companion. At other institutions, Joel Harrington, Jean Hébrard, Cordelia Hess, Sarah Higinbotham, Nancy Hunt, Hubertus Jahn, Daniel Jütte, Kris Lane, Maren Lorenz, Lyndal Roper, Wolfram Schneider-Lastin, Claudius Sieber-Lehmann, Christoph Singer, Christopher Wild, and Gerhild Scholz Williams all have my deepest gratitude.

Venturing into uncharted spacetimes required getting support from others. Mark Hengerer shared his publications on the imperial court with me. Stephan Kraft first called my attention to the Baroque novel that has made it into the book. He also connected me to Simon Wilkens, who generously supplied me with a reliable guide to this textual universe of several thousand pages. Mara Wade guided me in my exploration of emblems. Jakob Michelsen offered help with his vast knowledge of eighteenth-century Prussia at a crucial moment. Wojtek Jezierski called my attention to a source text. Jill Bepler informed me about women’s antechambers. Lynne Tatlock alerted me to the writings of Willibald Alexis. Heinrich Löffler supplied me with great lexicological support at a crucial moment. Birgit Gropp introduced me to Haus Harkotten in Westphalia. Martin Herzog shared a book with me.

I also want to express my thanks to the undergraduate and graduate students at Michigan who enrolled in several classes on the history, politics, and ethics of times in history. Special thanks to Shai Zamir for sharing fascinating and thoughtful finds with me.

I have been fortunate in that this project found the support of two exceptional institutions where research flourishes, the Historische Kolleg in Munich, Germany, and the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. Of the many wonderful people I met in the light-infused corridors of the NHC, I want to single out my virtual friends—Bryna Goodman, Rivi Handler-Spitz, and Robert Schine—as well as in-person fellows Emily Branagwanath, Michael Johnston, Joan Neuberger, and Saundra Weddle. The conversations Helen Solterer and I had in her backyard meant a lot to me, as did my friendship with Annabel Wharton.

The ensuing pages have been shaped by many audiences. My discovery of waiting as a theme goes back to a talk I delivered at the University of Basel in 2008, long before I entered the antechamber. Yet it was the confluence of the spatial and temporal in the word waiting that intrigued me. A foray at a panel organized by the Eisenberg Institute of Historical Studies in the Department of History was followed by many other occasions on campus, in the German Department, and elsewhere. The animated discussions at the Michigan Society of Fellows when Don Lopez directed this institution were a particular pleasure. Other versions were delivered at the following places of learning: Ruhr University Bochum; University of Chicago; University of Freiburg; University of Göttingen; University of Gothenburg; New York University; Paderborn University; Princeton University; University of Tübingen; Washington University; and University of Würzburg. The research nexus Kenneth Mills and Kris Lane created imaginatively, Horror and Enchantment, allowed me to think further through waiting as a theme, with special thanks to Zeb Tortorici, John Charles, and Heidi Scott. My interview with Bernardo Zacka, Architectures of Waiting, was one of the most pleasurable activities I could have waited to have happen to me as an academic.

Kathryn Babayan, Will Glover, Stephan Kraft, Rivi Handler-Spitz, Joan Neuberger, and Annabel Wharton read parts of the manuscript; their comments helped its gestation. Val Kivelson, Paolo Squatriti, Sueann Caulfield, Susan Juster, and Hussein Fancy helped me think through the introduction.

Haley Bowen generously researched bibliographical materials. Danielle LaVaque-Manty was a wonderful editor, and the illustrator Matilde Grimaldi is a delight to work with. Erica Wetter amazed me with her amiable dedication to waiting; she helped me steer the project to a temporary conclusion.

Gundula Boveland supplied me with many finds from the shelves of the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Germany. Without her passion, this book would still be waiting to see the light of day.

Among the publications that paved the way for this book are Architectures of Waiting: Helmut Puff and Bernardo Zacka in Conversation, Contemporary Political Theory 21 (2022); Gay Times: Ein Versuch zur Figur des Wartens, in Transatlantische Emanzipationen: Freundschaftsgabe für James Steakley, ed. Florian Mildenberger (Berlin: Salzgeber, 2021); Bedenkzeit (spatium deliberationis): Timing the Reformation, in The Cultural History of the Reformation: Theories and Approaches, ed. Susan Karant-Nunn and Ute Lotz-Heumann (Wolfenbüttel: Herzog August Bibliothek, 2021); and Waiting in the Antechamber, in Timescapes of Waiting: Spaces of Stasis, Delay and Deferral, ed. Olaf Berwald, Christoph Singer, and Robert Wirth (Leiden: Brill, 2019), with thanks to the publishers for the permission to republish materials from the last two publications.

As I am writing, I feel like I am still waiting for the final version of this book. May others complete the many tasks waiting ahead.

Introduction

Waiting means being no stranger to paradox.

—Andrea Köhler, Passing Time

The present study is animated by the apprehension that temporalities have frequently been obliterated from social analysis and cultural criticism. With its focus on times operative in a type of room, The Antechamber seeks to set an example to the contrary. We will visit societies and spaces of the past through the lens of a particular temporal modality: waiting.

Before we embark on this endeavor, let us take stock of the magnitude of the task at hand. We necessarily express ourselves by means of words and we usually think in terms of space is the opening salvo from Henri Bergson’s 1888 treatise Time and Free Will—a foundational essay on the problem of time’s perceptibility.¹ Almost 150 years later, the contemporary geologist Marcia Bjornerud detects a pervasive, stubborn, and dangerous temporal illiteracy in our society.² A conceptual hierarchy that prioritizes the spatial prevents us from recognizing that in late modern societies temporal norms . . . have become dominant, in the words of another critic.³ Despite these and other calls to change course, the obstacles to carving out how actions acquire meanings through socially mandated or culturally negotiated temporal protocols remain considerable.

The sociological literature that tackles social time, timing, and timekeeping has for the most part pursued one tagline: acceleration. In a dizzying array of publications, Hartmut Rosa, for instance, has proclaimed our times to be an Age of Acceleration. The insight that time as a resource is scarce at precisely a moment when human life expectancy has been on the rise (at least for those privileged enough to have access to health care and other services), serves as the linchpin of his social theory.⁴ Acceleration’s contradictions notwithstanding, this sociologist hypothesizes that Western societies are entering an era that amounts to a dictatorship of speed.

Theorists of modernity have persistently envisioned modern times as ever faster, more mechanized, efficient, attentive only to their own rhythms—a sense of historical progression that necessarily distances us from the past, and quickly so.⁵ This focus on speed is such an all-comprehensive theme that it risks swallowing all reflection on speed’s other: slow or still times, of which waiting is one.⁶ Even in our age of frantic standstill, interstitial times persist.⁷ With regard to technological innovations, Judy Wajcman contends that the simultaneous production of fast time spaces with those of remarkable slowness constitutes a temporal pattern in contemporary societies in the West.⁸ In fact, the COVID-19 pandemic, with its waves defined by the virus’s mutants, has upended restless everyday rhythms on an unprecedented scale, globally.⁹ My goal in this study is a modest one: to nudge practices of waiting and letting others wait above the threshold of our perception when studying society and culture.

If modernity is speed,¹⁰ as many critics contend with rhetorical verve and an armature of observations, then premodernity must represent its opposite.¹¹ According to this story line, times before the advent of what passes as modern were everything that contemporary societies are not: slow, steady, predictable. It is said that people back then viewed their existence as part of a cosmologically defined order whose cyclical nature grounded one’s life. What is a precious resource today must have been in good supply before industrial production, mass society, the bureaucratic state, and digital devices turned time into a scarce commodity. Whereas today we live for a future we hope to be part of, if not help bring about, people in the past lived in the present. Wherever they lived or live, whether in Africa, Asia, or Europe, premoderns and nonmoderns were or are little troubled by the irrelevant past or the unknowable future. Thanks to the religious certainties anchoring their communities, these people escaped and escape the mere functionalism of work-related stress in a globalized capitalism run amok.

To be sure, there are a great many versions of this vast terrain of assumptions.¹² At the same time, critics in this vein often treat the past like a projection screen: Pre-moderns were fated to live in a world in which their existence unfolded in a steady rhythm from birth, to death and beyond. Time was predictable and inescapably infinite, saturated with ideas of singular determination and first cause. . . . In the context of circular time, we waited for fate, that is, determination, or alternatively the intercession of magic or prophesy in order to break or confirm this circle of determination. Waiting for the future was subordinated to, or subsumed by, determination.¹³ The author marshals a chorus of luminaries to buttress his claim about premodern restfulness: Marcel Mauss, Stephen Hawking, John Berger, Norbert Elias, and Charles Taylor. Yet no studies of temporizations as experienced trouble a capriccio whose main, if not sole, purpose is to provide a historical backdrop to the apparently ever faster lockstep of modern life.

The author wouldn’t have had to look far. The 2009 volume in which John Rundell’s contribution appeared features a study of how Tibetan nomads time their existence. Their relationship to time, as Gillian G. Tan demonstrates, is strikingly dynamic: In their interdependent and attentive interactions with their environment, [social] structures and each other, [the Tibetan nomads] have achieved an attitude that does not attempt to grasp or fix.¹⁴ Different registers—the microclimate, time-honored practices of old, the behavior of neighbors in the present, to name but a few—inform complex decision-making processes about what to do next in an environment where being alert is of the essence because of water, food, and energy scarcities. If there is a commonality to how so-called pre- or nonmoderns in various parts of the globe inhabited or inhabit the temporal dimension of their lives, it is the layered texture of their experience—different from that of moderns, to be sure, yet tangled, existential, and affectively charged nonetheless.¹⁵

In this context, focusing on scenarios of waiting offers a chance for us to catch our breath. Let us embark on the task to forge new narratives amid the staccato of an ever faster discourse on acceleration—narratives where past and present temporalities come to resonate in novel ways.

Waiting is one temporal modality that makes time—according to Norbert Elias, time eludes the senses—experiential.¹⁶ Waiting portions out the flow of time; its temporal horizon has humans situate themselves in expectation of what is to come. Such an expectation is predicated, at least for routine social interactions, on a memory of similar experiences one has had or knows about. This strong anticipatory horizon sets waiting apart from similar states of the mind, such as tarrying, hesitating, or dithering.¹⁷

How long and what we are waiting for shapes how we, as waiters, experience the time we spend during temporal in-betweens.¹⁸ It matters whether we wait for the birth of a child or the diagnosis of an unknown ailment, whether we are standing at a bus stop to go to work or longing to hear from a lover. A prisoner waits differently for his imminent release than an overworked employee for a long-awaited vacation. Waiting for the Messiah near the end of times is unlike waiting for a person’s death to arrive. Still, all these experiences have something in common. No matter what one expects to occur, waiting can be said to be a bounded condition in which time becomes actual. It is a temporal modality tied to the prospect of a future conceived to be within reach—a state different from existential or open-ended waiting.¹⁹ Waiting for something or someone is thus both situational and generative.

What merits consideration, among other things, is the fact that waiting triggers responses in waiters: joyful anticipation, anxious reflection, bored indifference, fledgling tedium, and so on. Why confront the cluster of feelings and states of mind or body that waiting unleashes in those who wait? To answer this question, I turn to Vincent Crapanzano, an anthropologist who, planning to study the effects of domination on everyday life in South Africa under apartheid, instead arrived at writing about white South Africans, whose waiting shaped their lives:

To talk about dread, angst, guilt, or being overwhelmed, all of which are components of the experience of waiting, adds a metaphysical dimension, a melodramatic tension, to the very ordinary experience I am trying to describe. Such terms elevate the experience. They give it importance. They permit a sort of moral indulgence, a taking comfort, in it. Symptoms of the ordinary, they mask the ordinary. It is precisely this masking that has to be avoided. Waiting—the South African experience—must be appreciated in all of its banality. Therein lies its pity—and its humanity.²⁰

Despite its wealth of emotions, waiting often is considered dead time, untime, or nontime. To some, this state equals a state of deprivation, namely an inability to act on one’s own accord, or a state of dependency, if not a temporary loss of subjectivity. Precisely for this reason, waiting can be the most intense and poignant of all human experiences, as W. H. Vanstone proposes.²¹

Although we often like to think otherwise, being human necessarily entails being in need, whether we are children, frail, sick, or elderly. Even if adult and compos mentis et corporis, we might join the ranks of those who rely on others at any moment. As patients, we endure. Where assistance in times of need is a matter of course, we wait for assistance. We hope for support or survival where such infrastructures of collective welfare are lacking. In Vanstone’s words, one is frustrated not because the system constantly fails to deliver (which, of course, it does) but because one must constantly wait for it to deliver—because one has no alternative to waiting.²² For Vanstone, Emmanuel Lévinas, and others, living in time and waiting are inextricable—a form of Heideggerian phenomenology with a theological-temporal twist.²³

For social scientists, waiting has fewer ontological qualities. Rather than seeing it as indexical of the human condition per se, they interpret interstitial times as politically, socially, and culturally conditioned. Although waiting has to be tolerated individually, it actually forms an integral part of sociability. Whether the wait time one experiences is imposed or someone willingly subjects themselves to it, waiting enlists those who wait in its ranks. Waiters are removed from the activities that would fill their hours ordinarily. Intermittent waiting therefore disrupts routines while reorienting us toward other beings or infrastructures whom we rely on to end this in-between state. In this sense, waiting’s characteristics are about more than the strictures put in place by those in a position of power or authority. In many ways, waiting is structured time. An individual child’s capacity to calculate potential gains in the immediate future and choose to wait longer in order to be rewarded has been considered an indication of strength of character and, possibly, future educational or professional success, for instance.²⁴ Waiting is both an activity and an inactivity, a collective and an individual condition (sometimes simultaneously), and these dualities make it a modality worthy of critical attention.

In a study of feminist artworks on women in hospitality, Irina Aristarkhova reminds us that waiting is not expected equally from all people. . . . Some people (such as those in need of refuge, or approval, or another type of actual or social capital) are expected to spend more time in waiting than others.²⁵ Put differently, waiting scenarios reflect the distribution of power in a society. Importantly, these asymmetries concern people on the move: refugees from war zones, areas ravished by climate change, failing states, and other places of deprivation across the globe. They wait for food; they wait for passage; they wait for a visa or a stamp or some other recognition from the authorities; they search for a job; and they wait for friends and family members to join them. For shorter or longer periods of time, they live in a state of latency with high stakes, limited opportunities, and, in some cases, life-threatening risks.²⁶

But they are not the only ones who are waiting. Those who stayed behind, be they kin or friends, are often looking for news from those who left, for transfers of money, or for cues about how to follow on the same migratory paths. The children of the Eastern Europeans who work in Western Europe as caretakers, agricultural workers, or in other professions wait for a call or a visit; they grow up getting to see their parents only occasionally.²⁷

Modern bureaucracies, in particular, have made waiting an institutional mandate.²⁸ In a seminal account of how delays shape the workings of businesses, hospitals, publishing houses, and the like, the sociologist Barry Schwartz concluded in the mid-1970s that variations in waiting times reflect the distribution of power in a social system. What is more, how people wait—the time spans they are made to wait, their willingness to wait, their discontent with having to wait, the meaning they attribute to the wait, and how they narrate their waits—varies according to race, class, gender, profession, context, and culture.²⁹ In this context, Schwartz also touches on the impact of waiting spaces when discussing the atmosphere of the waiting room that can be orchestrated to produce a certain effect.³⁰ In Beyond Caring (1986), the photographer Paul Graham famously captured rooms in the UK’s social security centers. What we get to see are neglected spaces, filled with rows of plastic chairs, adorned with handwritten signs or posters peeling from the walls: spaces populated with apathetic waiters worn down by their plight (which we can only imagine) and, viewers are led to assume, a long wait.³¹

In a meditation on Blaise Pascal, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu sees social stratification imbricated with temporizations: Waiting implies submission.³² The powerful control time, their own and that of others. As a result, paradoxically, those in positions of power lack time. Because they are in high demand, their schedules are tight. At the opposite end of the spectrum are the powerless. The jobless, undocumented, and refugees not only command large quantities of time; their marginality is constituted, in part, by the inability of some of them to partake in temporal and other regimes that would allow them to make economic, political, and other demands to improve their lot. For those who are so powerless that they live apart from the civic horizons that make up the welfare state, restitutions, reparations, and caretaking are hard to come by.

This is why transitory spaces for the privileged sometimes serve as a refuge for the less fortunate. Mehran Narimi Kazeri, for example, lived permanently in the non-places of Charles de Gaulle Airport.³³ After having been denied entry into the UK for lack of identification, and with no visa that would have allowed him to enter France, this international traveler without papers was stuck in the airport’s departure lounges for eighteen years. Starting August 26, 1988, he lived confined to one particular area—he relocated to another area owing to renovations and other changes—where he slept, ate, washed, read, studied, guarded his belongings, and wrote a diary until he was moved to a hospital to receive medical treatment in 2006; after living in a Paris shelter for many years, he moved back to CDG Airport, Terminal 2F, shortly before his death in November of 2022.³⁴ Waiting became his life, as his autobiography says:

I am sitting on my red bench from the Bye Bye Bar in the middle of Charles de Gaulle airport, waiting to leave.

I am waiting for a green card so I can go to America. I am waiting for a British passport so I can go to England. I am waiting for my documentation so I can go anywhere.

I have been sitting on my red bench from the Bye Bye Bar in the middle of Charles de Gaulle airport waiting to leave for fifteen years.³⁵

It is rare for those who are waiting to address others as waiters while waiting. If their cause enters the public purview, others usually speak in their stead or on their behalf. Insofar as those who wait form a group, they are hardly ever heard. The impermanence of their state, as well as their isolation, even if they wait with others, works against their mobilizing. When those who once waited have moved on, their concerns may no longer be what they were when they were waiting. As a rule, those who have waited speak about what it means to wait, as a rule, only in retrospect, if at all.

In this sense, The Terminal Man qualifies as an exception. Sir Alfred Mehran addresses the reader as a Wartesubjekt. But the autobiography published under his adopted name transcends waiting’s liminality by embracing it as permanent—an outlook that echoes how prominent writers, philosophers, literary theorists, and essayists had cast waiting in the twentieth century (Roland Barthes, Samuel Beckett, Maurice Blanchot, Martin Heidegger, Franz Kafka, Siegfried Kracauer, and Michael Rutschky, to name but a few).³⁶ As a result, waiting for an identity metamorphoses into waiting as an identity, or so goes the story we get to read.

Judging from the quotations of Mehran’s diary that form part of The Terminal Man’s textual score, it is likely that his coauthor, Andrew Donkin, took an active part in shaping this waiter’s account. What is clear is that Sir Alfred Mehran erased traces of his bureaucratic self that possibly would have allowed him to make a home elsewhere than in a transit area. Whether he actually was Iranian (which he denied) and the identity of his parents were questions the authorities waited to see answered. Ultimately, this migrant turned the tables on those who were ready, if not eager, to right his situation (or simply were worn out by the media attention he received) and had them wait in turn for answers.

Indeed, over the years he was waiting and living in CDG Airport, he became a global celebrity. Journalists interviewed him; he received mail from all over the world; immigration lawyers took up his cause; his fate, it is said, inspired the Steven Spielberg film The Terminal (2004) (though no member of the director’s team seems to have contacted him); and Sir Alfred Mehran played a role in inspiring the British composer Jonathan Dove to compose The Flight (1998), an opera that has become a theatrical success.

If many people were touched by Sir Alfred Mehran’s waiting in permanence, it is, in part, because we can relate. Truth be told, we have all been there. Many of us know the experience of being stuck somewhere for some time, though most of us extricate ourselves from this state.³⁷ When young, we wait to become grown-ups; adolescence is often experienced as an exercise in extended waiting for something we know will come, though we are unsure what it will be like. In other words, scenarios of waiting invite identification. We are tempted to project our ideas, memories, or affects about waiting onto others whose waiting we learn about, different structures of liminality manifest in different waiting scenarios notwithstanding.

Anthropologists have recently begun to cast the social phenomenon of waiting as multiform. Waiting, it is said, is formative for those who wait. Craig Jeffrey, one of the